Jamin Bradley

Plenty of church people are afraid that if you play Dungeons and Dragons you’ll get a demon. Meanwhile, those who play the game find this idea laughable. As a pastor, I simply aim to play the game responsibly.

When I was a kid, me, my brother, and my neighborhood friend would play a game we made up called “Mister, Mister, and Mister.” The three of us (each named “Mister”) would imagine ourselves traveling through time using our handy-dandy portal powers. We made up many stories in these moments and never got any demons.

Granted, to the church’s point, I wasn’t using my imagination to worship any gods or participate in any weird rituals. Dungeons and Dragons is not this, but has the capacity to become this, depending on who is running the game and how open the player is to such moments. So could some sketchy moments open someone up to the demonic? I’m not saying yes, but I’m also not saying no. Imagination has a lot more to do with spiritual engagement than most people think, and many forms of spirituality, including Christianity, acknowledge that.

There are many things in life that are neutral. Whether they become good or bad is dependent on the participant. Teraphim in the Bible—what we translate as “household gods”—may be like that. In the ancient world, any kind of spiritual being could fall under the terminology of a “god”—including the spirits of dead humans. Of course, human spirits aren’t the “God” of all creation—they just belong in the ancient category of a spiritual being, or a “god.”

That being said, when Rachel stole her father’s “household gods,” she may have been stealing the equivalent of the family photos. It’s possible that these “gods” were simply carved statues representing family members who had died.

But the Bible never talks positively about the teraphim, because this (possibly) neutral practice seemed to take on a negative direction in everyone’s lives. Instead of having these statues around for memories, they became icons to try to communicate with dead ancestors. Eventually, the practice became overwhelmingly negative, making it sensible for God’s followers to avoid it altogether.